The times when blogging is too much of an arse February 18, 2013

Item – I had noro.

Item – I was angry and unhappy and sulky at the way things were going in the comments in the last two posts, and I didn’t (I still don’t) know how to respond.

Item – H has had a nasty, constant cough for four whole weeks now. We’re both sleep deprived.

Item – My period was late. Not, late as in a longer-than-28-day-cycle (my cycle is ALWAYS longer than 28 days), but proper real ‘your luteal phase is longer than usual’ late. Mine has been 11 days long for four cycles in a row. Before that, it was always 12 or 13 days long unless, and sometimes even if, I was pregnant. This month? It went 16 days. I had a nervous breakdown. Three negative pregnancy tests and brutal arrival of said period later, Occam’s razor dictates, given the near-total lack of marital congress round these parts (see Item 3, above), that, actually, I probably had the day of ovulation wrong, and my calculations were thrown by the fact I had noro and therefore a fever. Anyway, even so, my luteal phase was longer. This is good, I think. I think.

Item – I really did have a bit of a nervous break down. I spent three days begging and pleading with the indifferent universe not to be pregnant, because if I were, I’d absolutely certainly lose the baby, and I couldn’t take it, not again, ‘chemical pregnancy’ be fucked. The cognitive dissonance has torn all my protective scabs and callouses off.

Five stages of knowing an infertile person October 2, 2012

You know the Kübler-Ross model of grief, don’t you? How a person who has lost someone or even something Hugely Important, could (or, if your psychologist (for psycholgist, substitute random acquaintance who reads Pop-Psych for fun, as appropriate) is a twatweasel, should) go through five stages on the way back to functioning in a new reality? Even Elizabeth Kübler-Ross agreed you needn’t go through all of them, or all of them in that order, or any of them only once (not that this stops said occasional twatweasel from mistaking a model for a road-map and getting all ‘you haven’t been in denial yet! You’re not allowed to be angry until next month!’ on you), but they tend to go Denial (this can’t be happening to me!), Anger (How dare this happen to me!), Bargaining (How can I make this not have happened to me?), Depression (I can’t bear that this has happened to me) and finally Acceptance (OK, that happened to me. And I’m still here).

I thought, though, it made an equally fine ‘model’ for how your (well, my, OK our (Christ on a cracker, what is it with me and parentheses today?)) friends and relations deal with The Presence of The Barren Among Them. Because we’ve all been startled, annoyed, hurt, and occasionally giggle-rama’d by said friends and relations and how they deal with us. Yes? Interested? Got your cocoa? Let me ramble forth in an expository manner forthwith.

Denial – Some of our friends and family (oh, let’s say FaF. Sooo much less typing) get stuck in Denial forever. ‘First stage’ my bottom. And denial is the one where the nicer ones say ‘it’ll be your turn next!’ and ‘I’m sure everything’s fine!’ and ‘It was just bad luck!’ and the infamous ‘Just relax! The nastier ones say ‘You’d better hurry up with that kid-making, you know. You’re not getting any younger,’ and ‘Worse things happen to people, you know. It’s not the end of the world’ and ‘Well, if you weren’t so bloody neurotic about it…’ and ‘Are you sure you and [spouse] are doing it right? Har har har.’ And everyone thinks you really do want to see eight million pictures of the family babies and hear blow-by-blow accounts of your cousin’s pregnancy and knit booties and are completely baffled when you try to tell them all this relentless baby-talk is, well, upsetting, especially after [insert personal horror here]. Denial, usually, fades after a year or two (or three, or if you’re my mother, six (and she still has outbreaks)), as it becomes totally fucking obvious to all except the most clueless hen-witted whistledick that THERE AIN’T NO BABY. Which leads to:-

Anger – Aaaaaaand we’ve all been victims of this, haven’t we? Anger and its best friend Blame. ‘Why won’t you go to Cousin SillySlut’s baby shower? You’re so selfish!’, and ‘Why won’t you give us grandchildren, you selfish person?’ and ‘Why can’t you just be happy for me? So what if my third child is due on the same day as the one you miscarried? So what if I announce twins at Thanksgiving just when you found out your second IVF also failed?’ And ‘It’s because you were such a slapper at college. It’s your comeuppance,’ and ‘Well, you must have done something to cause the miscarriage,’ and ‘I knew you shouldn’t try to have kids,’ and ‘You’d be a crap parent anyway,’ and ‘Well, we don’t really want you to come to Baby Flymo’s Christening because it’s only for parents…’ Of course, not all your FaFs will be such massive turds – at least, I pray not all your FaFs are such massive turds. But alas even the kindest of souls can suffer a sociopathic episode and say something monumentally crass and hurtful out of sheer flap-burble-nervous-mouth. My own mother once asked me if there was anything I could have done to stop a miscarriage. As if it wasn’t perfectly bloody obvious that had there been, I would have done it. And some FaFs genuinely mean to hurt. The situation, your grief, makes them acutely uncomfortable. Sadly, humans do lash out at whatever or whoever is making them acutely uncomfortable. And humans also hate the thought that Crap Happens To Good People. If they entertain said thought seriously, it means, OMG, that Crap could happen to them. And this is too scary to deal with, so they prefer to blame people for their misfortunes. And also lash out, because you and your misfortunes made them think, damn it, and it was really scary and they are so not doing it again so it must be your fault. Eheu.

Bargaining – Bargaining is the ‘why don’t you just adopt’ phase of FaF involvement. The ‘Why don’t you just do that in-vino-test-tube thing?’ stage. Come on, surely if you Do This Thing, the Bad Sad won’t happen, and then it’ll all be OK? Yes? OK? Please? No more sad? So why don’t you eat pineapple/go on vacation/try this doctor/do what [totally unrelated person with different health issues] did? Why won’t doing this simple thing help? Why won’t throwing money at the problem help? Please make this dreadful sad thing stop happening to you, to us, to the family? Here’s a fertility amulet and a cheque and a photocopied article from a magazine and eighteen amateur cod-diagnoses and a bottle of cough-syrup and a cruise brochure and your Granny’s nightie and a website on fostering and Jane-you-went-to-school-with has adopted Chinese twins and please please make this bad thing stop happening. It’s fucking infuriating for infertile peeps, this phase, mostly because your bargaining FaFs are so almighty fucking clueless and clearly don’t listen to a word you say, but, eh, they can’t listen right now. If they did, they’d have to deal with the fact there is eff-all they can do except listen. And nobody wants to feel that powerless. Certainly not us, and, yes, not them, either. Which leads to :-

Depression – This is considerably worse for the infertile person than for his or her FaFs. This is the stage when they give up. They stop asking you to family things. Friends stop calling, and tend not to answer your emails. They don’t want to talk about it, and pushing them can lead to outbreaks of Anger or Denial or Bargaining or, sometimes, in a magnificent display of missing the fucking point of who here is actually the one who needs thoughtfulness the most, all three in one short email. They don’t want to talk to you full-stop, because you might bring ‘it’ up, and they can’t talk about ‘it’, because they feel guilty and powerless and awkward and can’t deal with the fact Crap Happens To Good People and there’s nothing anyone can do. They’re pregnant again, and have no idea how to tell you, especially as they know you’d give your eye-teeth to be in their shoes and all they can think about is haemorrhoids, mortgages, and bloody buggering teething for the third time in four years, and they feel ashamed. Or they’ve never been pregnant in their lives but are happy as Larry that way and simply do not understand why you aren’t. And there it is, the widening pool of silence, loneliness, failure.

Acceptance – Ideally, a FaF would ‘get’ that it’s not about them. That you can be happy for them while being sad for you, and they too can be sad for you while being happy for them. That you won’t talk about ‘it’ incessantly. That you do need to talk about it sometimes and a good friend will listen, pass the kleenex, and pour more tea/whisky/cocoa/merlot. A good friend will know they’re not supposed to fix it, just to cheerlead. That they should respect your decisions and choices. That they should keep asking you to showers/Bris/birthdays, even if you say no half the time, because their love for you is about more than mere apposite social cohesion. A good FaF not in the trenches themselves would be aware that silence from you is a sign you are lonely and overwhelmed and not coping, and not comfort themselves with the lie that ‘oh, s/he’ll get in touch when they’re ready!’. Because they would realise that reaching out to people is hard, and reaching out to those whose lives are already full of babies and toddlers and school runs and milk-teeth is even harder, not least because you – we – have been socialised to Put Parents First. A FaF in acceptance would be able to say, simply, ‘I’m so sorry this has happened to you. I am listening. Have an eclair.’

Tales of woe July 15, 2012

We have… well ‘news’ sounds far too exciting… ‘results’ sounds too hopeful… ‘a shit-storm of wtf, I told you sos and up yours NHS’ probably encapsulates it.

We are both in a bit of shell-shock I think. May doesn’t want to get angry again, so has asked me to step up to the mark and write a post although she has given me some of her draft rantings to draw on. Let me start by describing the context of our lives this stuff has landed… May reports:

“Work is stupid and full of stupid people and I don’t like it. I actually reported a colleague to their line-manager the other day, for being an incompetent fuck-wit whose work I was just about that sick of redoing for them (this is, of course, a situation that has been going on for over a year. Rage). I then spent hours sorting out a hideous mess of misfiling and laziness, and had to file another complaint about protocols being ignored. Then I found out I am The Subject Of Gossip in the tea-room, with camps dividing into those who are convinced I’m pregnant, and those who think I have cancer. Then a superior entity told me off for not doing something, and when I said plaintively that no one had told me about it, she pointed out she’d announced it at the meeting. The meeting I was off sick for, did she mean? Yes! Well, I was off sick, and she hadn’t circulated the minutes yet (two weeks later. Hmph). Nevertheless, I should have known, and I needed to go and do it, and bugger everything else in my in-tray, because I should have scheduled the time to do this thing I had no way of knowing I was supposed to be doing. Worst of all, I defended a colleague’s decision to a student, even though I was a bit uneasy about this at the time as I thought she was being ridiculously draconian. I double-checked today, and I realised she was not merely being a jobsworth but had actively screwed up and then not been honest with me in order to elicit my support. I so very much wish now I’d gone with my first instinct of cheerfully telling her not to be such a whistle-dick and to do as the student asked.”

While May is in a “work-induced state of advanced temper”, I, H the implacable, have also been pissed on from on high at work. The Big Project I have spent months working on, has been summarily shelved, and I have been presented with a whole new Big Project with entirely different software and parameters and skill-sets and told, basically, to lump it. Not only that, but show leadership for my team and be enthusiastic for this new Big Project and take charge (even though it’s being run outside of my control) and make sure it succeeds… It’s been a couple of weeks of mayhem and personal anguish as I started to see the project crumble around the edges as if on a cliff overhang, but powerless to stop it then plunge into the ravine.

Meanwhile, my counsellor has gone on holiday for a few weeks, just as I thought I was getting somewhere. May and I have therefore been needling and sulking and bitching and snapping and getting on each other’s tits in a rather distressing manner.

May puts it better than I ever could:

This is H and May, people! Star couple and all-around loved-up snuggle-bunnies of the decade! And I’m all ‘Take your Goddamn issues to the counsellor, because I am stressed to death here and I have no patience with you or anyone or anything!’ and H is all ‘You’re stressed? What am I, chopped liver? And, you may remember, the counsellor is on sodding holiday,’ and I’m all ‘cry me a river’ and he’s all ‘eat my shorts.’ Our sex-life is parlous. Funny that.

In which mood, I had to slink back to the wankatorium, so they could do DNA fragmentation test, with May in the back-ground wailing:

‘but we haven’t had sex for days! And now we can’t for days! I’m going to ovulate to spite you, so there’. Which helped. Even more so as we weren’t going to worry about conceiving until we’d got all our test results back and spoken to Dr Expensive again, so I am being so exceedingly rational and not in the least bit deranged-harpy-on-hormones.

I was shown to a different room this time and dared to hope that my in-laws wouldn’t be looking over my shoulder this time. Alas, while the picture was different it was definitely of the same area – I had the wherewithal to take a picture on my phone this time to show May – I think she was shocked how like their landscape of abode it was, but still laughed [Because I am a cow - May]. A new set of magazines to peruse – and with May not sitting in the waiting room upstairs I felt slightly more relaxed about having a look. It was going fine until I encountered two pages stuck together, which made me rapidly cast it all aside and go and wash my hands again and start from scratch.

I also managed to get an envelope of results so far from Dr Expensive’s clinic when I picked up my referral form… our blood was actually shipped off to Chicago for the testing (not sure what to put on the entry form for the ‘have you been to any part of the USA previously’ type question… ‘part of me has’ may get an interesting response), to whit (for reminders what these are see May’s details wot she wrote):

Item: No STDs (yay/*yawn*)

Item: TH1:TH2 intracellular cytokine ratios TNF-a 26.6 (good range 13.2 – 30.6) IFN-g 16.8 (good range 5.8 – 20.5) big tick next to the figures, so assume that’s OK. However, it’s at the high end and they have a tendency to increase, so would need to be monitored (expensive).

Item: DQ Alpha Genotype – May: 0201,0301; H: 0102,0201 – so we have a 25% chance of embryo looking like May’s DNA to her antibodies and therefore being confused for a possible unwanted cancer or something and attacked. This is probably quite common and shouldn’t be a problem in its own right, but this could also be a factor in other test results and also, as May said, causing increasing sensitivity issues.

Item: NK Assay (% Killed) Panel
These should be below 15%:
50:1:  14.6% – this is borderline, but it does come down with IVIG and ILs (see NK assay with Intralipid, below).
25:1:  8.8%
12.5:1:  4.5%
IgG conc 12.5 50:1:  8.1%
IgG conc 12.5 25:1:  8.0%
IgG conc 6.25 50:1:  11.3%
IgG conc 6.25 25:1:  8.1%

% CD3:  83.9% (should be between 60% and 85%)
% CD19:  7.1% (should be between 2% and 12%)
% CD56:  8.6% (ditto)
% of CD19+cells, CD5+:  14.1% * – this should be below 10%, so is starting to point to auto-immune issues *eye-rolls all round* May’s family is rife with auto-immune issues, so not surprising.

NK assay w/Intralipid:
50:1 w/Intralipid 1.5 mg/ml:  10.3% – someone drew a large arrow pointing at this number on the print-out. As you can see, intralipid treatment lowers the NK kill rate, which I think is a Good Thing?.
25:1: w/Intralipid 1.5 mg/ml:  5.4%

Item: Leukocyte Antibody Detection
Flowcytometry:  Negative
[T-cells] IgM+:  1.0%
[T-cells] IgG+:  17.2%
[B-cells] IgM+:  53.8%
[B-cells] IgG+:  19.0%

Here is the kicker – these should be above 30%, preferably above 50%. With so many low figures (although the first two are less important the most important is the last) it looks like the Leukocyte Immunization Therapy (LIT) will be order of the day, controversial and expensive we are.

So, in summary it looks like May and H are a little too familiar and friendly, our embryos are so loved and familiar they’re squished out of existence [We shall have to call the next embryo 'George' - May] and May’s system is getting more and more sensitive to the ‘tricksy’ little things. So I said:”Your immune system is just like you, argumentative and hot tempered.” To which May retorted: “Well, even your sperm are fucking passive aggressive!”

Conclusion: a microcosm of our relationship plays out in May’s uterus every month.

And then we laughed like drains, and I made cocktails.

Where does this leave us? Adrift at the moment, not really sure what to make of it all. My instinct, of course, is to run away. We’re still waiting for thyroid and DNA fragmentation before going back to see Dr Expensive. If you see two dazed people looking marooned, crestfallen, slightly bitter then approach carefully, they have been known to snarl.

I’ve even been busy June 23, 2012

It’s been how long since I last posted? Holy crap.

I think my blogging mojo has not only been snagged in my angst-tangles but throttled. I shall have to bury it at the bottom of the garden and see if I can find a new one in John Lewis.

Anyway. Yes. I do have things to tell you. Let me tell you them:

Item – H is now seeing a counsellor. Once a week, he trots off early so he can get in a good ol’ mind-reaming before work. My reactions to any insights he has passed on to me from this process have been about one third ‘oh! How interesting!’, one third ‘WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT OH MY GOD YOUR COUNSELLOR IS A GENIUS!’ and one third massive eye-roll because I’ve been trying to point that (whatever ‘that’ was) out to H for about nine years now. So, yeah, I think I approve of the counsellor, but am slightly wrung about the withers by her knack for inserting information into H’s brain, whereas I just bounce information off his skull until we both lose our tempers. Anyone would think she was a trained professional or something.

Item – A few months ago Womb for Improvement emailed me details of the Immunology and Recurrent Miscarriage/Infertility expert she went to see in December. I clutched the information to my chest and then shilly-shallied about with it, as I do, while waiting to see if the NHS were going to do anything other than fat-shame me and lose my blood-test results. NHS promptly fat-shamed me and then lost my latest set of blood-test results (FSH and oestrogen, taken in March). So I told H to set us up an appointment, and he did, and we are going to see this expert on Wednesday.

Item – And why am I going to yet another world-renowned miscarriage expert? Well, because The World-Famous Book-Writing Professor’s solution of ‘lose more weight, here’s some aspirin’ seems to have Not Worked, in that I am Not Pregnant, and haven’t been for 18 months, which is fucking infertile behaviour right there. And my allergies have got markedly, infuriatingly worse, which makes me twitch. Clearly my immune system is in hysterics (hysterics! See what I did there!). How can it not be relevant? I Declare My Immune System Relevant!

Item – Speaking of immune insanity, I now cannot take white wine not even cooked in risotto. Two mouthfuls of fancy delicious risotto at nice Italian restaurant with my in-laws, and I had to flee to the bathrooms to clutch my stomach and groan like a door-hinge in Dracula’s castle. Also, the roof of my mouth swelled, and my lips and throat became violently itchy. It was fun, dudes. So, list currently stands at:

• White wine (very much so)
• Red wine (less so, some wines actually drinkable, others not at all) (And yet, I can eat fresh grapes! Make sense, damn you!)
• Beer/lager/stout (wheat-and-gluten-free lager I had a few weeks ago was fine. It even tasted fine.
• Honey. Cooked, raw, in small quantities in other foods, all bad
• Raspberries
• Bananas
• Kiwis
• Hazelnuts
• Walnuts, to a lesser extent
• Wheat (not so much the burning itching, yes so much the violently inflated gut and concommitant painful belching and groaning

Item – So, aspirin. I tried an experiment this month. I took 75mg of aspirin every day from about a week after my period started. A lot of women with RPL are put on low-dose aspirin throughout their entire cycle. It’s cheap, it has very few side-effects, and if I have thrombophilia at the best of times, well, I’m getting frantic, here. It did not delay ovulation. I am not pregnant. I was still in considerable pain for over a week after the end of my period (giving me nearly three weeks of daily cramps. Hurrah!), so it didn’t help with that, but then I wasn’t really expecting it to. However, ovulation itself didn’t really hurt. I had pain a few days before I ovulated, but pin-pointing the day itself was a bugger, as my temperatures were all over the place (too many lie-ins) and I just didn’t GET the terribly stabby I-am-burst moment (hour. Day. You know). Which was weird.

Item – Period due any second now, so that’s Sunday screwed and Monday (I was going to go to a concert on Monday) buggered and Tuesday ballsed up and I am just praying I will be able to go to this expensive private appointment with expensive private specialists. Do you think it would help if I turned up in his office eau-de-nil in the face and then passed out on seeing the bill?

All is not well May 21, 2012

The Period began as expected on Sunday morning. By Sunday evening I was throwing up con brio despite the fact I wasn’t in that much pain – I’d taken my painkillers on schedule and before the pain got bad in the first place, like a sensible woman. As H said to me, handing me a glass of water to rinse my mouth with as I staggered forth from the bathroom for the fourth or fifth time, clearly my body knows it’s in a lot of pain even if we’re not letting my brain find out.

I still feel pretty nauseous today. Bah.

It’s not the not-eating I mind. But not being able to drink more than a tiny sip of water at a time, and those sips spaced out by hours, in case I trigger the ‘eject’ button again, that gets unpleasant. My lips are dry, my skin is beginning to itch and flake, I have a headache which persists despite the industrial quantities of diclofenac and tramadol in my system. I am losing a fair amount of fluids anyway, what with Cute Ute Of Doom’s immoderately lavish attitude to menstruation. This sucks.

On the Pollyanna side of the matter, I’ll take being nauseous and vomiting but in mild to moderate pain over being not-nauseous but in severe pain, and I’ll definitely take it over the unutterable hideousness of being in severe pain and puking my guts out, which is the modus operandi of choice if Cute Ute and her infiltrating accomplices aren’t bludgeoned into silence with opiates and NSAIDs.

This week is my birthday week. Normally, H and I book this week off and Go Away, and so we had done, until it occurred to H that given the regularity of my cycles, this was bound to be the week The Period would turn up and ruin everything, so we cancelled and rebooked and are now Going Away next week. We both felt very clever when we realised this cycle was going to follow precedent and our birthday holiday was not going to be spoilt by my innards and their appalling shenanigans.

Therefore, of course, a couple of days ago the In-Laws called us to let us know H’s grandmother (on his mother’s side, not the widow of the recently deceased and much missed Paternal Grandfather) had had a stroke, and wasn’t expected to last the night. This was a bitter-sweet painful relief, in a way, as she has severe dementia, and hasn’t been able to speak, let alone look after herself, for a long time. She doesn’t recognise her own children now. Last time I saw her, well over a year ago, she certainly didn’t recognise me (she’s known me for 20 years), and I’m not sure she recognised her grandsons. Since then, in her bewilderment and growing inability to communicate, the poor lady has been prone to rages, tantrums, wandering about the nursing home screaming in fright at two in the morning, trying to fight off her nurses in terror. It was horrific, and very, very draining and distressing for MIL. So when we heard she was dying, we, well, yes, we were, sort of, sadly, relieved.

However, my Grandmother-in-Law has the heart of an ox, and a particularly young and athletic ox at that. She’s still alive. Unconscious, and barely breathing, and they think the stroke has done a great deal of damage, but she’s alive. MIL and her sisters are spending every day by her bedside, and are slowly going to pieces, and every day she stops breathing, and every day she starts again all by herself (she has a DNR order). It’s so sad.

Of course, if she does die in the next few days, the funeral might well be during our holiday. H is making plans for car hire and such – we are going to holiday in the UK, we usually do – so we should be able to attend. It’s just, and yes, I know I am being colossally head-up-own-bottom by saying this, that I’d've liked a holiday for once where nothing did go wrong, and we weren’t banjaxed by sickness and death and grief and family troubles. Ah, well. C’est la mort.

I make no sense just because, OK? OK. May 13, 2012

So, yes, thoughtful pause has ensued. Sorry about that. Well, I’m sorry about that if you were in any way wanting to read more of my ramblings and fossickings (you strange masochistic person, let me clasp you to my grateful bosom). If you didn’t care, well, then we’re all staring at each other in a confused fashion, because you are, aren’t you, reading this? And yet you don’t care? How odd you are. Hello!

Anyway. I felt rather as if I had painted myself into a corner with the whole ‘Let’s Talk About FEEEEEEELINGS!’ thing, and so I had to do what everyone who paints themselves into a corner has to do – that is, sit on the radiator kicking my heels until the paint dries. Meanwhile H’s post has brought all sorts of fascinating people out of the woodwork to comment. It’s gratifying and astonishing. (Apologies if you never thought of yourself as the sort of person who lurks in woodwork. Do you prefer shadows? Corners? Having been sitting quietly over here all this time?)

So, on to the meanwhiles. Meanwhile!:

Item – I have H’s cold! At least, I think it’s H’s. It could be anyone’s. I live in a big city and people cough and sneeze so very inconsiderately (did I ever tell you about the chap at work who was about to hand me a book, felt a sneeze coming, lifted the book to his face and sneezed right on it, wetly, and then put it in my poor little cringing bare hand? I wish now I’d had the strength and swiftness of mind to put my hands behind my back and GLARE at him). I was clearly feeling out of sorts on Friday, and woke up yesterday morning with my throat on fire. On. Emmineffin’. FIRE. And a fever. And now I have ear-ache. Which is an embuggerance.

Item – It’s six dpo and I don’t feel comfortable stuffing myself to the gunwales with anything more punchy than paracetamol and tea. Which sucks. I rather wish I had the insouciant gumption to just shout ‘the hell with it!’ and snarf 400mg of ibuprofen and a Beecham’s flu powder and a large ginger-wine toddy and possibly a thumbnail of cocaine and all (is cocaine any good for colds?).

Item – To my horror, my astonishment, my despair, and my utter horror, I had a screaming weeping melt-down on Friday. Because it was the 11th, I think. Because while I am no longer in active mourning for that particular pregnancy, or, I think, any of the others, as such, I still feel bitterly cheated out of four years of pregnancy and motherhood. I still feel I should have a three-and-a-bit-year-old, and these past four years have been an intermittent torment-by-denial. And because it’s Mother’s Day (not in Britain, mind you (we have ours in March, before Easter), but for most of the rest of the planet and therefore for The Internets) and because I will be 37 in a couple of weeks and I have not a single living child about me. And because I have been going through The Period Designed By Abyzou, for years now, every month, and the only reason for me to go through this physical torment is in the hope of pregnancy. Which isn’t happening. Fucking fuck fuck fuckitty fuck.

Item – Speaking of which (The Period, not the fucking) H and I cancelled and rebooked our traditional end-of-May holiday this year because we counted on our fingers and saw the dates we’d already booked might be invaded by Said Period, and therefore Would Not Be A Holiday Experience. And then of course panicked that Satsuma would uncooperate and delay The Period by a week and Fuck Up All The Things. She didn’t, bless her, she ovulated when I usually expect to ovulate, and I was quite surprised, because I have trust issues when it comes to Satsuma and I will have them forever. Sorry, Sats.

Item – You know how you have visions of your life, and life goals? H did, bless him. I had life goals too, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, you see. A) I was going to be a professor and writer, B) I was going to have at least one kid, preferably two, to whom I’d be the coolest, adorablest, most thoughtful and loving mother in the whole Goddamn world, and C) I wasn’t going to have the sort of fucked up, emotionally dishonest, unsupportive, unloving, cats-in-a-sack, serially unfaithful marriage that is common in my family, and I’d rather be single than deal with an atom of crap at any point at all in any of my relationships. A has gone down the crapper, B is going down the crapper, I am left with C. I need to re-write C – indeed, to a large extent, I have rewritten C. I’ve kept the bit about not having an emotionally dishonest, unsupportive, serially unfaithful marriage, indeed, I’ve put that bit in 16-point bold. But I’ve had to radically redifine ‘crap’ and exactly how much an atom of it is, though, you know, to leave room for people being tired, or sad, or depressed, or angry, or grieving, or having a bad day, or a blind-spot about other people’s bad days. When I am in a state, I regress, and my ‘atom’ shrinks and becomes oh, so much less forgiving, this is true. It is also true that the pain of the sad slow demise of A and B makes me even more unreasonable than necessary about C. I fear I have lost everything and become completely utterly blind to all the other things I am any good for, or have achieved. On Friday, for example, I was loudly and weepily announcing that I have achieved nothing, nothing at all in my entire life, while H looked at me with compassion, and also with startled incredulity. I had actually completely forgotten that I had three degrees (two post-graduate), a good marriage, a job, a talent for cooking, knitting, and writing poetry, and quite a few good friends. It’s madness. I am quite mad.

Item – Anyway, H has his first appointment with the counselling service next week. Which makes me feel like an elephant has scrambled down from my shoulders. There’s still a clan of them camping out on my chest and all around my living-room, yes, but the one on my shoulders about H’s state of mind was giving me a crick in the neck. Hurrah!

Item – Yes, I know. Get my own counsellor. Stat.

Oh woe, woe is me April 29, 2012

It’s been a bitch of a week.

Item – H and I are still less than charmed with certain aspects of each other’s behaviour right now (all the other aspects are adorable). H is shilly-shallying about booking an appointment with the counselling service, and I am being self-righteous about it despite the fact I have done absolutely grand fuck-all about finding a counsellor of my own, because do as I say, not do as I do, that’s why. Meanwhile, H is in a permanent low-grade sulk, and I haven’t had sex for nearly a month, and I can’t begin to unpick how the two are related.

Item – For the record, I’m not the one who’s avoiding sex round here. That is not our relationship dynamic. I am given to understand that we are unusual, but there it is. I want more sex than H does. When stressed, he avoids sex and seeks cuddles. When stressed, I avoid cuddles and seek sex. I am basically a bloke with tits. Apparently. Especially according to the Relate website which is one of the most patronising, stereotyped, unhelpful, and just plain scientifically, biologically, and emotionally wrong things I ever did read on the subject. How the hell do they think reading that makes a woman with a higher-than-her-partner sex-drive feel? How isolated, abnormal, freakish, lonely? How do they think it makes a man whose not as randy as his partner feel? Eh? Did they think at all? And these are the number one people supposed to help relationship issues? No. Just, no. Not going to a Relate counsellor. Not now, not ever, not if it was an ultimatum. No. Jesus. Seriously. It’s 2012.

Item – On Wednesday, I struggled through the day at work with increasingly unpleasant, err, gastrointestinal distress. I wondered if I’d eaten one of the many (many many bloody Goddamn many) things that I now appear to be allergic to (the HELL, immune system?). I was well enough to go out to dinner with my parents that night, but the next morning, well, basically, I was just about ready to leave for work, and The Lower Bowel, It Objected. I spent hours of that day in the bathroom. Hours. (About 50 minutes in, I thought ‘and that is why they invented iPads’).

Item – Anyway, my digestive track appears to have got a grip again (hahahahahaHAHAHA). I said to H, perhaps this is actually some kind of IBS? and he pointed out that, technically, he has the IBS niche in this household covered, thank you, so I’m back to recounting my allergens and glaring suspiciously at labels. I can’t see us doing IBS as a joint hobby working out very well.

Item – Therefore on Saturday we were at the shopping centre (mall to you transAtlantic types) looking at toasters (we rock so hard) when I noticed a lacuna in my vision, and people’s heads getting peculiarly (horribly) distorted as they stepped into it. I blinked. Now I had two lacunae. BUGGER. Migraine. H bustled me into the nearest chemist and I choked down two liquid ibuprofen capsules while standing in the queue to pay for them – the sooner I can get aspirin or ibuprofen down me when the aura starts, the better chance I have of heading off the Skull-Crushing. We went back out onto the main concourse and I considered the overwhelmingness of the noise, and the visual distortions, and the growing sea-sick feeling, and decided I was going home. We live about 10 minutes walk from said shopping centre and I had about 20 to 30 minutes before Mjölnir plunged out of the stratosphere into my parietal lobe. H would have to look at fish in the supermarket without me. And off I wobbled out into the rain. I bumped into the main doors (twice, like a pinball), four passers-by, a bus-shelter, a bollard, and the table once I’d got home, but I made it, and had even constucted a nest consisting of blankets, pillows, blinds drawn, and lap-top playing factual literary programmes from Radio 4 (no laughing, is vital) very very quietly before the first great crushing onslaught. I am a very lucky migraneur. I wasn’t sick, and though it felt like someone was scraping out the left side of my skull with a sharpened melon-baller for a few hours, it had faded considerably by 6pm, after the application of paracetamol and more ibuprofen. I still can’t say long words without buggering them up, and I’ve corrected the spelling on everything I’ve written today at least twice, but the headache! Is! Mild! Yay!

Item – So today H decided to up the ante and poison me by feeding me taramosalata. I was about two mouthfuls in when it dawned on me that taramosalata is, in fact is supposed to be, 40% breadcrumbs. I love taramosalata. H knows I love taramosalata. He got it for me as a treat while I was lying in the dark remonstrating feebly with Matthew Parris for dissing W.H. Auden. BASTARD SON OF A BASTARD BASTARD’S BASTARD. The gluten, that is, not H, or Matthew Parris, or even Auden. H also bought me tulips, so he can stay.

Item – My step-father said something on Wednesday that made me so boilingly cross I don’t know what to do with myself. Which is awkward. As I love the man dearly. But I think it needs a whole post to itself, so I shall post this one and go see if I can make tea without pouring boiling water into the filter jug and then milk into the kettle.

Abash’d the Devil stood April 17, 2012

Unlike yesterday, I didn’t forget to take my mid-morning dose of tramadol today, so I am feeling a lot better than I felt yesterday afternoon (to whit, like a wolverine was tearing my lower abdomen to pieces with knife, fork and jack-hammer).

Not that I like taking tramadol. It makes me feel unpleasantly like being drunk (“What’s unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water.” – Douglas Adams). And mefenamic acid makes me feel sick, heartburny, and sleepy. And diclofenac makes me feel like I’m trying to drive my body from inside a box of cotton wool in the next room. I’m amazed I can still spell. Can I still spell? I may be hallucinating correct spelling right now as I type, and not a word of this is making sense.

Anyway, given that the pain is under control (that is to say, I have backache, and an ugly dull bruised feeling extending from belly-button to knee (why in the name of sanity to my thighs get involved? Seriously, what’s it to them if my uterus is pitching a fit?), but I am not nauseous or in tears), I am finding spending the day in bed with the radio, the internets, and my knitting almost pleasant. And alternately, there’s cold heavy rain beating on the windows and bright glassy sunshine pouring through them. Weather very odd. I am rambling. The rainy bit is cozy-making, what with double-glazing, a functioning boiler and a duvet.

Before Cute Ute The Ironically Named kicked off, H and I had gone to his parents’ for the weekend. Last Saturday was his Grandfather’s memorial celebration (not a service, as it was totally secular, what with Grandfather being a humanist and philosophical atheist (another reason why I adored him so – we had similar outlooks on, well, nearly everything)). H and I were reading the eulogy between us, and along with all the other sorting and organising and making of ham rolls and crudites for modern day Funeral Baked Meats (H’s Grandfather loved Shakespeare too) … (I am being entirely too parenthetical. What was I saying?) … Anyway, we and the In-Laws all stuff to do, and everyone was anxsty (In-Laws bickering more than I think I’ve heard them bicker for years, poor people (damn, ‘nother parenthesis. BLOODY TRAMADOL)), and I was rather concerned that my period would turn up a day early and Fuck Things Over. I’d been spotting since Thursday and Cute Ute and Satsuma between them are prone to brinkmanship. However, one of my more unusual and inexplicable gifts is that of calm, straight-backed, unfazed, clear-voiced public speaking, even when four centimetres from the verge of tears and/or falling over. I was fine. H did fine too.

The memorial celebration was, in fact, very beautiful, joyous and moving. We all laughed, we all had at least a little weep, we all agreed H’s Grandfather was a Mensch. And a talented, witty, charming man of great gifts and great achievements, but most wonderfully and above all, a Mensch. We should all be so lucky.

I started to flake out during the restaurant dinner we had afterwards. Couldn’t finish eating, felt increasingly woozy. And then H and I were sleeping on the fold-out couch in the In-Laws living-room. How do you make people sod off out of their own living-room so you can lie down? Especially my Brother-In-Law, who is a) a night-owl and b) chatty and c) the last person I want to discuss my uterus with and d) I was getting too frazzled to think of something nice and vague to say to him about being tired or under-the-weather.

Sunday I was Proper Afflicted. H went off to visit his Grandmother and give her all our love without me, and I, pale as milk, curled miserably up on the refolded couch while MIL made me cup after cup of tea and chatted gently to me. At one point I was visibly shaking, and she was visibly upset to notice this. I felt an odd mixture of one part ‘see? I am not fucking around when I say this hurts,’ one part ‘OK, I do actually feel quite selfconscious that you’ve all noticed I look and therefore obviously feel like hell,’ and about ten parts ‘OW OW OW OW’.

And then H came back from his Grandmother’s and we drove home.

H is still in a bit of a state, emotionally. And why shouldn’t the poor sod be? He’s just said goodbye to his beloved Grandfather again, and seen his family all sad and stressed, and had to do public speaking infront of 100 people, and his job is not being any less tiresome, and his bloody wife is ill again, and still not pregnant, which is coming under the heading of Unreasonable Also Unfair, Damn You Universe. As he said in his post, he’s actively hunting down a counsellor of some sort at the moment (remind me to nag him about it (what? I’m his wife. Nagging is in the wedding vows)). The thing is, usually, when H is in a state, it has been my job/duty/role/honour to help him work out what he’s in a state about, what he can and can’t do to destress the situation, and what is and isn’t helpful behaviour. I usually understand H quite well – better, sometimes, than he understands himself – and can be actively useful in getting him to have some insights. I can be helpful even if my speculations are wrong, because I give H the prodding necessary to think and say ‘no, actually, that’s not what’s bugging me. It must be something different. Something to do with [xyz], perhaps.’ And H has usually found this sort of thing useful, and leading to improvements in his state of mind, even if it was unpleasant or difficult at the time.

Of late, however, I just haven’t had the strength, the energy, the motivation, to do all that. I am finding dealing with my own health issues, anxieties, and depression rather a full-time job, and with H being unsupportive (sidle, sidle), isolating and resentment-causing.

The thing is, H resents me. Well, not me exactly. He resents how ill I get each month, and what an almighty fucking bore it is to deal with, and how it banjaxes plans and ruins holidays, and he feels guilty about resenting it all, and guilty that I am the one actually doing 100% of the physical suffering, and helpless (no fun at all for a fixer), and then of course sad at the Continued And Persistant Lack Of Baby. Dealing with me (difficult to avoid altogether, I’m in his bed, looking like I’ve been made of wet paper) is a constant rubbing-of-nose into the above issues, which make him feel bad, which he can’t deal with, which he sidles away from, which he can’t sidle away from, which he tries to compartmentalise and repress, which is nevertheless lying in his bed moaning faintly and demanding fresh hot-water-bottles, irrepressably. Basically, he needs to go tell someone other than me, someone safe, that it fucking sucks and he’s had ENOUGH and it’s not FAIR and ARGH and GRR and FUCK FUCK FUCK BUGGER AND DAMN.

Of course, he mentioned his family tragedy, the poor aunt who was bi-polar, and whose hallucinatory highs and terrible, crushing lows scared the living crap out of the family over and over again before she couldn’t bear it any more and took her own life. When H was growing up, strong emotions, any strong emotions, delight, or rage and sorrow, were triggers. He was told to calm down. He was sent to his room. He learnt, quite young, not to have strong emotions. Whereas I grew up in a family where just about everyone was loudly, noisily, extrovertly emotional all the time, and shrieks of laughter and of rage were equally likely at the dinner table. Often during the same dinner. I was an introverted, sensitive child, and found this all quite painfully Too Much.

When H and I met, I saw in him a place of calm, of phlegmatic, stoic, good-natured placidity, and it was so peaceful, and restful. Being with H was like a warm bath and a cup of tea. It was like lying down under a shady tree and watching clouds. After the shouty, anxsty chaos of my family, the serenity was enchanting. Meanwhile, H saw in me a joie de vivre, a lively, fierce delight in and passion for, well, all sorts of things, ideas, art, literature, ethics, flowering trees, Star Trek, kittens, mountains, astronomy, yada yada, passions he himself didn’t even share the half of, but to him, after the guarded fear and worry and flattened affect of his childhood, intoxicating. And to this day, I find his unflappability in most crises, his practical kindness, and his mellow acceptance of, well, stuff, truly lovable. And H finds my righteous indignations, tendency to give all the cash in my wallet to teenage beggars, and raptures over cherry trees and falcons and Doctor Who and knitting yarn adorable and refreshing.

But because we’ve been a couple since we were teenagers, I am driven round the fucking twist by the flipside – his refusal to think about or deal with issues, his inability to get really enthused or delighted about anything, his wet-blanketness; while H, bless him, is both annoyed and unnerved by my ridiculous idealism and unrealistic high standards and expectations, my uncanny ability to be both exalted by thing A and really pissed off by thing B at the exact same time, my tendency to cry and shout when angry, by my fascination with emotions and feelings and every goddamn infinite little variant of thought that anyone has had ever in the history of consciousness.

Which is normal. It’s a truism, because it is true, that whatever it was that attracted you to your mate will be exactly what drives you bonkers about them three years in.

Anyway. It has been quite a few months since H and I have been on the same wavelength. We argue and explain and try to get to grips with it and each other and sometimes, for an hour or so, succeed, and then by the end of the week we’re both back in our own anxst-choked caves and again, unable to find each other or lean on each other for support. We’re still loving towards each other. We still say please and thank you and offer each other tea and help with the laundry. H still reads me poetry in bed (yes. He does. ENVY ME). We still cuddle before we go to sleep. We are not teetering on the brink of the Abyss of Marital Embuggerance – at least, I don’t think we are. But we are both lonely, and sad, and rather angry with each other, and unable to find our way back to equilibrium by ourselves.

Which we ought to do before we start IVF, don’t you think? Because if we think we’re stressed now…

A finger-drumming kind of post, with no updates. January 21, 2012

Item – Still no letter regarding post-operative appointment with Miss Consultant. I clean forgot to ring the hospital up again on Friday and re-harangue the answer-phone. Damn.

Item – I still haven’t ovulated. Satsuma, darling, do we really need to start this again? I thought we’d got this covered. It’s day 26. I’d prefer it if you got it together by day 16. You know, ten days ago. Yes, of course I’m fretting, you tiresome gonad.

Item – And the uncertainty and delay is not good for one’s sex-life. There’s only so much ‘well, we really should, because I might be ovulating’ humping a couple can take, after all. Especially when you add migraines and job-stress and family worries and the fact January sucks to it all. We both just want a nice cup of cocoa and an early night with a book. So badly. I am convinced Satsuma is just waiting until there’s not such a thing as a living sperm left in my person before popping. No, no, wait, that’s not sadistic enough. She’s waiting until there’s an almost vanishingly tiny chance that any sperm are left, and then she’ll ovulate, and then we get to spend the two-week-wait almost totally absolutely sure there’s no point in avoiding coffee and booze and liver and brie, but not quite.

Item – So, yeah, I got nothing. Waiting and grouching and waiting and grouching and waiting so on ad infinitum.

Item – I noticed quite a few of my Gentle Readers have unsubscribed recently. Well, yes, it is very boring round here at the moment. Sorry about that. I will try to get my head out of my depressed arse and try to be witty, at least, even if I can’t provide plot momentum and interesting drama. But not today. Today I am still sulking.

Item – On which note, I have the house to myself today (H is at a conference), so I am going to drink coffee, write emo poems and listen to radio documentaries about astronomical phenomena in literature. To the kettle, bat-pals!

Triggers October 18, 2011

Item – towards the end of October, 2009, I discovered I was pregnant for the second (possibly third. Bastard chemicals) time. And promptly miscarried. Dramatically. (Who’d've thought such an early miscarriage would make such a bloody mess?). I was, I swear, not really thinking about this particular miscarriage at all. The subject of miscarraiges generally, admittedly. But I do seem to have some kind of ghastly internal calendar app that goes ‘bing!’ a week or so before the anniversary of something horrible.

Item – The 15th of October is the increasingly internationally recognised Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it. Making a big deal of it makes my skin feel crawly and several sizes too large, and the pink-and-blue ribbon, lavender-everything-else, angels-in-heaven aesthetic of it all makes me feel sick. Which is, I know, deeply unkind of me, as many many women get a great deal of comfort out of the idea of their lost babies being angels, and pastels and babies are inextricably linked in the public consciousness. But I am an atheistical snarkazoid and think of my dead embryos in shades of ivory, midnight, and blood. Anyway, there it is. A big event in my tiny, lopsided online community. I nerved myself to mention it on F*ckB**k. I was not going to post about it much here. That’s where I am, grieving-wise, or thought I was (but see next item, for Foolish May Is Foolish).

Item – However, I did want to be home by 7pm to light a candle, and join the Wave of Light following the sunset round the planet. We’ve done this, H and I, for the past four years. We talked about doing it a few days before hand. H saw my FB post. And then we went our separate ways – I was having lunch with my girlfriends (huge long post somewhere in the works about having girlfriends, especially these girlfriends) in another city entirely, and H had an important meeting/rehearsal thing for a Thing he is doing which is not my business to spread all over the internets. H can do that if he likes. (And it makes me so proud I think I might just kvell myself into a spasm). I had a simply marvellous day out. However, the train home went tits-up on me and I knew I was going to be late, later than 7, anyhow, and I couldn’t get hold of H. H’s mobile phone, I could get hold off, but he wasn’t answering it, so… Well, actually, so I left him an increasingly angry and frantic set of texts and missed calls, and got home to find him still not there, and lit the damn candle at 7:30 pm, and proceeded to have a text-message row with the now responsive H, who’d simply been somewhere very noisy (‘pubs‘, I believe they’re called) and couldn’t hear his phone. The which excuse I’d buy if it weren’t for the fact we have a row about his bloody phone and the fact he can’t hear it and therefore doesn’t answer it every few months for the past four years. H was extremely sorry and repentant to realise he’d forgotten the 7pm candle thing, and even more sorry and repentant to realise he’d really pissed me off. But still. I was really pissed off. I am still really pissed off, but self-aware enough to realise that a lot of this is to do with Slough of Despond also hormones and therefore it isn’t actually fair to still be pissed off with H. So I sublimate, and am pissed off with everybody.

Item – There was a blood-curdling story on the BBC news, that doctors might be diagnosing anembryonic miscarriaged prematurely, and therefore performing D&Cs on viable pregnancies. This is of a piece with the whole Campaign for Better Miscarriage Care, really. Now, before anyone panics, I know, I am sure, that my own D&C, for my first miscarriage, was performed on a very dead and anembryonic pregnancy indeed. I had a scan at week six, and a follow-up scan more than a week later that confirmed that the gestational sac had not only failed to produce a foetal pole, or a heartbeat, but had actually shrunk a little and collapsed into a weird oblong. No, my PTSD-type reaction was, of course, partly induced by the spiral of miserable reminiscence I was whizzing down into like a penny in a coin vortex funnel, yes, but it was also empathic. I couldn’t sleep for thinking of all the women out there who had read this and were now… thinking… that about their doctors and themselves.

Item – Speaking of unfortunate news stories, someone at work – luckily a stranger to me – was speaking loudly to her friends the other day about how the NHS should not be wasting precious resources on fertility treatments. After all, child-bearing is a choice, and people shouldn’t have to pay for others’ choices. She said this while pushing a buggy with two children in it. I, tax-paying fool that I am, am paying for her disgusting spawn to be immunised, to be treated for their coughs and colds at the GP’s, to be hospitalised if there’s an accident or severe illness, to be educated, and if she loses her job, which she might, economy in pan etc., and I keep mine, I will be paying for her hideous whingeing little snot-and-chocolate-covered grubs to be fed, housed, kept warm and clothed via social security. And, you know, I don’t begrudge anyone else, my taxes on behalf of their children’s health and well-being and education, not a penny of it. I’m a socialist, I believe in national health care and education and benefits. Her, and all the others who think my kids can rot in limbo because they are, after all, a mere ‘choice‘, I begrudge every single fucking penny, from the failed STD clinic free condom through every scan and midwife visit right up until her crotch-fruit can pay their own fucking taxes.

Item – A friend, who is drifting away to the furthest reaches of friend-hood, has been posting pictures of her (very beautiful) child on FaceBook (perhaps I should stay well away from FuckBook for a bit). I should have a child the exact same age as hers. And, naturally, twice as beautiful. It – oh God, I’ve turned into that woman – stung. Our friendship really started falling apart when I miscarried and she sailed on into a healthy, normal pregnancy, and birth, and motherhood, and I lost more babies and she… stopped talking to me. This friend is now trying, laudably, bless her, to get back in touch, and I, less laudably, want to say to her ‘my life is a bit foul, really, and H and I are slogging through a seemingly endless trough of shit, and funnily enough quite a few my friends, noteably the ones who had no problems at all conceiving and carrying to term, simply dropped me and ran and this made me feel no better at all. Incidentally, I’ve lost at least one more pregnancy since you last asked, and now I’m awaiting surgery. Are you now going to regale me with ninety-seven quadrillion adorable-baby-related anecdotes? Let me stop you right there.’

Item – Oh, and there’s my job. I know it’s bad form to complain about one’s job in the current economic climate. One should adopt an attitude of uncritical adoring gratitude. But my job is currently driving me round. The. Twist. The students are demanding, stupid, lazy, selfish, noisy, and did I say stupid? Well, a lot of them are stupid. Money doesn’t talk, it swears, to quote the one-and-only Bob Dylan. Most of my colleagues are lovely, clever, sensible beings. A few of them are idle, vague, confused, lazy, thoughtless, difficult, spiteful, and whiny. I can’t get from one end of the day to the other without having to clear up, sort out, rearrange, delay, or reschedule at least an hour’s work because one of them has fucked up or arsed around or been utterly unbothered. And someone is possibly pregnant. I wouldn’t mind – she’s a nice person and why shouldn’t the nice people have babies? – but a certain gossipy cadre of staff (who, funnily enough, share a large chunk of Venn Diagram with the spiteful, whiny, lazy ones) have gone into Noisy Speculation Overdrive. I hope said Cadre get piles. Then at least they won’t be able to just sit there while they refuse to work and loudly snivel on and on about everyone and everything that is so very not their business.

Item – the two things I wanted out of life in my 30s – a baby, and to write a book. If I can’t have one, the other doubles, trebles, in importance. About this, I had such a fucking melt-down on Sunday I think my head exploded. Certainly it felt as if it had exploded. Vicious circle – I am so tired and depressed and unwell that after a full day’s (unsatisfactory) work, I have no energy to write. After a few days’ not writing, the depression and anxiety get worse, which, you know, helps, also, vicious circle perpetual motion motor right there.